Wam's Ramblings

I'm a big fan utilizing credit cards that pay me perks to make purchases
I'd be making anyways. I pay off all my cards every month, so I don't
have to deal with the downsides of credit (the exceptionally high interest
rates and fees). I also have a good deal of self control and don't allow
myself to fall into the trap of putting purchases on a card if I can't
afford to pay for the purchase. If you don't have the self control to pass
on a purchase you can't afford even though you technically could buy
it on credit, this approach might not be a winning strategy for you. Also,
using online bill pay with your bank is highly recommended so you're not
stuck writing out 4-5 checks every month and associated postage.

3% back on a category of your choice that you can change every
quarter. I have choosen Travel and Entertainment, and buy movie,
Broadway, ballet, concert and other tickets with it. Other
categories include Walmart, utilities, discount stores,
department/electronics stores, restaurants, pharmacy, home
improvement, gas.

I've been pointed to this card as one possibly worth considering. It looks
like it provides a 2% cash back reward, which puts it on par with the Fidelity
Amex I currently have; however, since it would be either a Mastercard or Visa,
it would avoid the whole "Amex isn't accepted here" problem I've had with my
current "default card". Ideally, if it were a Visa, it'd allow me to leave the
Amazon card at home, and carry just the Amex Blue, the Huntington Mastercard, and
the Citi Visa and receive all the benefits I currently have carrying 4 cards.

Keeping track of what card provides which bonus might be confusing if I
had to keep track of it in my head. To avoid this, I simply let the card
itself remind me what it is to be used for using some paper that gets
taped to the card.

Any cards you guys like that I missed? I know some people make good
use out of airline point cards to buy flights. This can perhaps score
a higher return, but I just don't buy enough airline flights to really
put this perk to good use.

Around the turn of the year, a blog article caught my eye which included
a list of 10 things to do related to one's personal finances at the turn
of the year. One of the suggestions was to research all of my holdings to
find the expense ratios and figure out exactly how much I was spending
on my investments. Well, I decided to do this and set up a spreadsheet to
help me track the expenses and such. Man was I shocked... astounded actually.
I'd never really paid that much attention to my investments (that was what I
was paying my Edward Jones financial planner to do after all). I'd spent
the prior couple of years trimming the fat in the household's day to day
operations. I'd switched phone service to a cheaper option, cut the cable
service, started cooking at home a lot more. I was no spendthrift,
but I had decided to try to be at least a little more frugal. I was
incredulous when I saw how much money I was spending on the investments I
was in. The fact is, since I never really saw a bill for those expenses,
it was super easy to ignore.

Anyway, that all kicked off what has turned into a pretty passionate new
hobby for me. And unlike most new hobbies that end up costing me money; this
one has ended up both saving money as well as even making money.
I fired my Ed Jones advisor and have taken a much more active role
in charting my own economic future. I started reading books, blogs, forums,
prospectuses, IRS tax code and more. I'm pretty happy with how things are
looking for me, but the more I talk to friends and even passing aquaintences
on forums, the more I realize that I am certainly not alone in my situation.
I also found myself repeating a lot of the same good advice over and over. So, to avoid future repetition, I figured I'd make use of the new blog features of
my website and start posting some of my lessons learned so that I can refer to
people to them later.

I really don't have the desire to start writing a lot of original content
to explain concepts or to paraphrase what I've learned from others. I'm
also not doing anything really that is particularly innovative, so my posts
on these topics will likely be mostly referring folks to other resources with
perhaps some personal commentary. My current thought is that I'll probably
post content on the blog, with the Personal Finance category set. I'll also try to link the post into a
master index of personal finance topics I'll
maintain.

For roughly the past 10 years, I've been attending the
US PyCon conference. This is my favorite
conference series of all the various tech conferences I've been to
(including: OSCon, Usenix, Blackhat/DefCon, CanSec, SAGE, Strata, Network
World/Interop, and others). While at PyCon (and other conferences, for
that matter), I try to take decent notes. My note taking tool of choice is
FreeMind (XXX: perhaps a blog on why Freemind will be forthcoming). So my
conference notes generally are in the form of
mindmap documents.

Anyway, the conference notes for PyCon 2015 (Montreal) are now posted.
I've exported the mindmap into a variety of formats, including:

First and foremost, these notes are meant for my own use, so if the presenter
talked about content that I well understood I might not have put the effort into
taking notes. Conversally, if a presenter talked about a topic I might not have known very well, the notes might not have gotten recorded if I got lost. Or, perhaps I just got sidetracked by the conference twitter and/or irc feeds...

After a night out on the town in Montreal last night, I had the opportunity to chat with
Asheesh Laroia about a variety of topics (including the
very cool project/company Sandstorm). Among the other topics we
discussed, he pointed out that PyOhio actually ends with io and that
it would be cool if the conference had the domainname pyoh.io. He was obviously right, so I
went ahead and registered the domain and have set up some redirects to pointing to the official
website. I'm also exploring some other cool things we can do with it.

I've decided I'm going to start treating more of small utilities I use as real projects. One of these
small little utilities is ls_display,
a tool I use to take a stream of input (stdin) and output
it in columns, similar to how the UNIX ls(1) displays file lists. Notably, this means dynamic
number of columns, width of columns, and the rendering of data vertically down columns rather than
just horizontally across tabstops.

I've quite literally lost track of how many iterations of wamber.net there
have been. I'm now writing off the the prior version of the site as a
complete disaster. The use of a content manager to manage my personal site
seemed like a good idea at the time; but not only did it not accomplish
the goal of a CMS (making the site easier to use); it actually impared
my use of the site. It's pretty embaressing how little I actually I used
my site while it was configured with a CMS. My workflow is much more
aligned to writing my thoughts down in a text document using
my favorite editor than writing content into a text widget. Consequently,
the tool I chose to help me manage the site kind of did the job, but only
because I avoided using the site and thus didn't have anything to manage.

So, for iteration n+1, I'm going old school and adopting a static
website. I'm now using the
nikola static blog generation software. I
think this probably is more in line with how I generally want to use
the site. Write some ideas down in a text file and publih them in a way
that can actually be well integrated into a website. We'll see if this
reduction of complexity actually ends up improving the usability of my
own site.